And the conspiracy bandwagon rolls on. The latest movie to hitch a ride on Oliver Stone’s coattails is The JFK Assassination: The Jim Garrison Tapes, a documentary that stakes the same claim as Stone’s — that Garrison (played by Kevin Costner in JFK) had a credible case against New Orleans businessman Clay Shaw for involvement in President Kennedy’s murder.

”The truth about Garrison and the trial has never really been told, not even in JFK,” says the documentary’s writer-director, John Barbour, a former Los Angeles TV newsman and host of the hit television series Real People from 1979-82. Barbour taped his Garrison interview in 1981 but was unable to obtain funding for a complete feature until Stone’s JFK began to stir interest last summer.

Tapes, which includes an interview with controversial former Pentagon-CIA liaison officer Fletcher Prouty (on whom Donald Sutherland’s ”Mr. X” character in JFK was loosely based), will see some big screens but will mostly play on video. The film is sure to draw a lot of flak from Garrison critics, though Barbour insists that it ”deals only with facts, with hard evidence.”